The Sacramento Kings and DeMarcus Cousins make for one of the NBA’s most prickly marriages between organization and superstar. Cousins is an outspoken, highly temperamental type, while the Kings as a company are a petri dish of dysfunction and drama. The results are about what you’d expect.
The latest in a long run of telling documents out of Sacramento is a tweet from Cousins, sent out on the night the Kings often do the most damage to their hopes at putting a competitive roster around him: the NBA Draft. Cousins clearly wasn’t pleased with what was going on:
Lord give me the strength 🙏🏿
— DeMarcus Cousins (@boogiecousins) June 24, 2016
…or so it seemed until he later offered this explanation, anyway:
DeMarcus Cousins explains his tweet on Draft night: "Bad timing," he said. "It sounds ridiculous, but I was in a hot sculpting class."
— Ian Begley (@IanBegley) June 27, 2016
The man they call “Boogie” has certainly partaken in the comically parafictional before, once fabricating a new aspirational music career as an April Fool’s Day gag. His moniker in this fake reality was “Boogie Smooth,” and one imagines that Mr. Smooth, in whatever pretend universe he exists, has a strong but supple grasp on any spinning hunk of clay that comes his way.
The Kings did nothing terribly objectionable in the draft, picking up Marquese Chriss, a high-upside athlete, at No. 8. Then again, they traded Chriss to Phoenix, for Bogdan Bogdanovic, and the No. 13 and 28 picks. They then selected Georgios Papagiannis at No. 13, another center despite having perhaps the best center in the game with DeMarcus Cousins, and a solid backup with Kosta Koufos. Then they compounded that mistake by taking Skal Labissiere, a center power forward combo almost identical to current King Willie Cauley-Stein. Both Skal and Cauley-Stein even went to the same school, Kentucky.
Cousins might have been in the hot sculpting class, but we think he might be sculpting something else when he’s saying that about his draft night tweet. ?
